Antroine “Tron” Majette says he’s probably more of a grandmother’s boy.
“She spoiled me more,” he says with a laugh.
Now 27, Majette says he knows about the stigma some gay boys face in school by being called “mama’s boy.” But he never had to deal with such labels growing up. Raised by his single mother and grandmother, Majette says they were his mentors, and he wasn’t ashamed to be close to them.
“I never had to deal with [teasing], not at all,” he says. “I’m black, so maybe it’s different for me. I am a mama’s boy. I love my mom. She taught me everything I know.”
Majette now works for Sprint in Atlanta while also serving as the CEO and founder of WhatsTheT.com, a website that promotes urban gay events across the nation. He came out to his mother when he was 18. At first, she was uneasy with her son’s sexual orientation, but he says she was supportive, they remain close, and she became even more welcoming as he got older.
Majette attended the May 4 Atlanta concert by Kanye West — a mama’s boy himself? —and was so moved by the performance as well as the song West sings about his mother, “Hey Mama,” that he’s sending his mother and 12-year-old brother tickets to the Kanye West concert as a Mother’s Day gift.
“I really love that song, and it was so beautiful seeing him sing it,” Majette says. “I thought it would be nice to give to my mom.”
MAJETTE MAY HAVE ESCAPED being teased for being a “mama’s boy,” but many effeminate men who prefer to read or sew rather than play baseball are given the derisive label as a way of calling them gay. Even psychiatrists and therapists at one time thought the term “mama’s boy” was a legitimate diagnosis for homosexuality, says gay psychiatrist Jack Drescher, author of the 1998 book, “Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man.”
In the early 1960s, psychoanalyst Irving Bieber conducted a study that asserted, essentially, that boys who are too close to their mothers will grow up to be gay. Extolled as groundbreaking research at the time, Bieber’s study stated that homosexual men typically came from absent or hostile fathers and smothering mothers. Gay men even feared baseball, said Bieber, because, in the world of psychoanalysis, the sport symbolized castration.
“Despite its shortcomings, this theory does lend the weight of medical authority to a cultural belief that a father should be the head of his household,” Drescher wrote in his book about Bieber’s research. “However, it is essentially the story of a boy who is closer to his mother than he to his father, the stereotype of the mama’s boy.”
This “faux science” has now been shoved aside for more accurate portrayals of gay men, says Drescher, a New York City-based psychiatrist and former chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s committee on gay issues.
“In my field, we don’t think moms create homosexuality,” he says. “Your child being gay has nothing to do with how you raised your child.”
But the term “mama’s boy” is still used to degrade another person, Drescher says.
“‘Mama’s boy’ is not a psychological term, but basically a social judgment about boys who are closer to their moms than they’re ‘supposed’ to be,” he says. “In our culture, you don’t call someone a mama’s boy and mean it as a compliment.”
THAT WAS DEFINITITELY true for Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network. In his 2006 memoir, “Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son,” Jennings retells stories of constantly being beaten and berated by his brothers and cousins in rural North Carolina and often called a “mama’s boy.”
Using “preacher’s son” in the title was easy — his father, who died when Jennings was eight years old, was a fundamentalist Southern Baptist preacher. Putting the words “mama’s boy” in the title was deliberate as well, Jennings said.
“I picked ‘mama’s boy’ because it was used very much as an epithet when I was a kid; it was used in a very derogatory way,” he says. “But it also has an ironic twist, because my mother was a huge influence on me. I’m very proud to say I’m a mama’s boy. So the term I hated as a kid because it was used in such a hateful way, now I embrace it.”
There is an element of sexism as well in the phrase, Jennings says.
“It implies someone is like a woman and being like a woman is bad,” Jennings says. “But when you hear ‘daddy’s little girl,’ you think of a little girl who is cute and charming. You’ll never see moms say, ‘He’s my mama’s boy’ in a positive way.
In 1988, scientists at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research published the book “Sexual Preferences: Its Development in Men and Women” and found it didn’t matter how children were raised when it came to them being gay or straight. But many gay adults said as children they took on the opposite of socially acceptable gender roles — or, to put it most simply, girls liked to play boy games and boys liked to play girl games.
FOR ROXANNE AND KELLY PREJEAN, lesbian mothers raising a boy, making sure their son has male mentors is an important part of their parenting.
“He’s a mama’s boy, that’s for sure,” laughs Roxanne Prejean when talking about her son, Noah, 10.
The couple makes sure Noah gets plenty of male influence in his life through three gay male close friends he sees regularly, as well as from cousins and other family members.
“Definitely it’s important for any child to have role models around them of the opposite sex,” Roxanne Prejean says. “We made sure we had that resource for him.”
As for Noah, a fourth-grader in Decatur, having two moms is “kind of fun, kind of weird.”
“One of my moms is kind of like my dad, and my other mom is the girly mom,” he says. “A lot of kids in my school aftercare have two moms.”
Is he teased by other classmates?
“No, but they ask a lot of questions, like how did I get two moms,” he says. “And I tell them.”
AS A YOUNG BOY, JOHN-PAUL GRIFFIN, 30, of Atlanta, was very close to his mother and admits he was definitely a mama’s boy.
“She had a Girl Scout troop, so I went to Girl Scout meetings. I even sold Girl Scout cookies for god’s sake,” he says. “I was the quintessential mama’s boy, but I grew out of it.”
Picked on and teased by his classmates for being close to his mother was hurtful, Griffin says. How did he handle it?
“I went home and cried to mama,” he recalls. “I didn’t like being teased about loving my mother.”
His relationship with his mother these days is much different. The two haven’t spoken in more than two years because she can’t accept him being gay.
“She was really rude to my ex, to my friends. And the great thing about being gay, you don’t have to take disrespect,” says Griffin, program director for YouthPride.
“Regardless of who [disrespect] comes from, none of us have to take it. I try to instill that in the kids at YouthPride.”
Griffin says he wishes his mom “the best.” And while she is no longer in his life, he understands the importance of recognizing female role models. Each year, he sends Mother’s Day cards to his stepmother, his aunts and other important women in his life.
WRITER AND POET RANE ARROYO was also separated from his mother when he came out. Arroyo is a Puerto Rican/Latino poet who was born in Chicago and is a professor University of Toledo in Ohio. He contributed a story about his relationship with his mother for the 2000 anthology “Mama’s Boy: Gay Men Write About Their Mothers” and has a book of poetry, “The Buried Sea: New & Selected Poems,” set to be released in November.
“I grew up in a very macho culture and I wasn’t like that and my mother was blamed because she was always 100 percent supportive,” he says.
Arroyo says he and his mother were always close and he protected her from family violence when growing up in Chicago. His father, however, was unhappy that his son was more interested in art and poetry and not sports or being a lawyer.
When Arroyo told his family he was gay, his father cut him off from the family (“He said I was to dead to him”) and refused to let Arroyo speak to his mother. The separation between mother and son contributed to driving Arroyo’s parents apart.
But she came to live with him and his partner in an apartment above their home, which is the story he relates in “Mama’s Boy.”
Recently, Arroyo bought his mother a house close to him with money he earned from his writing. Their relationship continues to blossom, and he says he has no problem today being known as a mama’s boy.
“We’re best friends,” he says. “My mom gave me courage and taught me how to be brave … there’s not a better teacher than that.”
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